Acer overtakes Dell in global PC shipments

Acer's Gateway acquisition positioned it as the world's third-largest PC vendor two years ago. Now, boosted by a 16.6% year-over-year growth in notebook shipments, the company has officially leapfrogged past Dell to take the second spot just behind HP. According to the latest figures from iSuppli, the Taiwanese firm commanded 13.4% of global shipments in Q3 2009, compared to 19.9% for HP and 12.9% for Dell.

Finally, someone overtook Dell. I work at Best Buy and almost everyone that comes in states that they have never heard of Acer and that they are some type of off brand. Every time this happens I laugh on the inside, if only they new what a dumb statement that was.

very impressive. i bought an Acer before but like moltar said, i also thought they were one of those "off brands" and returned it and bought a dell. of course, this was way back when i was a computer-challenged. what a mistake... no doubt my next purchase will be an Acer.

I have definitely been impressed with some of the Acer products recently so i am not too surprised. Lets hope they don't make the same mistakes Dell has done. Actually i think Dell has made the choice to ship less computers but try to get higher margins as i have found their prices less and less competitive with HP and Acer (particularly in the last year).

This is not bad news for DELL by any means. No offense to you guys, but I am the Senior Engineer at an IT solutions firm in Maryland and must tell you that with respect to build quality, parts and longevity, Acer, Emachines and Gateway are by far the worst manufactures. They each use tier three (lowest grade) PCB boards and compents while DELL, Toshiba, Asus use (Tier 1) components which also explains why their default warranty for hardware is 3 years versus 1 year from Acer. Now, if you are just a bargain shopper and really are not to concerned with high specs, Acer is not a bad option. We have to replace every Acer desktop at a school here in the county with DELL because the school went cheap and bout Acer's that have been nothing but a money pit. Good for our business though, but expensive for the client.

It is really nice to see Acer perform well but will they do something about the quality of their products? I have seen a lot of their laptops with a lot of problems. Whenever a friend asks me to recommend them a laptop I usually tell them to buy anything but Acer or Myria.
Maybe I will change my opinion the next few years.